"One hundred and eighty two people, including civilians and the warring groups were also injured."

Residents braced for more fighting on Saturday as rebel reinforcements rushed to confront the government offensive. As night fell, sporadic gunfire echoed over the crumbling city.

"The fighting in Mogadishu will intensify the coming days," an opposition source said.

Residents scuttled across the dusty streets and sheltered by walls as heavy gunfire shook the capital. Some children milled around near a dead body, its blood draining into the sand.

Fighters wearing headscarves with ammunition belts draped over their shoulders loitered on a corner as a battered 4x4 pickup with a heavy machinegun on top raced past.

The government says there is little hope of talks with the Shabaab gunmen trying to topple it. The administration says the rebels have no political agenda and have hundreds of foreign Islamist militants in their ranks.

"The opposition groups have been provoking us for the last three weeks," Defence Minister Mohamed Abdi Gandi said.

"We shall continue fighting this opposition with foreign ideologies. They want to destroy our government by the use of violence but it will not be," he told reporters.

Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, an influential Islamist opposition leader who once ran Mogadishu with President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, also said his forces would battle on.

"We shall defeat the government soon, God willing," he told Reuters in his Mogadishu home. "We should not be deceived by Westerners like Sharif."

The heaviest fighting for months has killed scores of civilians and uprooted tens of thousands in the last two weeks.

Fighting has killed at least 17,700 civilians and driven more than 1 million from their homes since the start of 2007. About 3 million Somalis survive on emergency food aid.

The United Nations refugee agency UNHCR says 49,000 people have now fled clashes in Mogadishu in the past two weeks.